Tech Lead, Site Reliability

At Podium, we bring AI Employees to local businesses that turn every conversation into revenue. Trusted by 60,000+ businesses across Auto, Home Services, and Aesthetics, Podium captures and converts leads 24/7, driving both new business and repeat customers.

In under 24 months, we crossed $100M in AI Agent ARR, scaling 300% year-over-year. During this time, we’ve deployed 10,000 AI employees to empower real business outcomes for our customers. Podium is building what we believe will be the most impactful AI employee ecosystem for local business.

Podium has been recognized as the Best AI Implementation by Inc. Magazine, highlighted by OpenAI for building revenue-driving AI Agents, and awarded the #1 AI Agent for Business Operations by G2.

Our growth is fueled by hiring exceptional people, holding them to high standards, and creating opportunities for them to grow and make an impact. Our operating principles guide daily behavior and ensure we hire people who will thrive at Podium. If you're hungry for growth, aligned to our operating principles, and ready to get to work, you won't find a better place to learn and accelerate your career.

About the Role

We're looking for a SRE Manager to help us build and run infrastructure that just works - even at 3am. You'll lead a team of engineers who care as much about preventing incidents as they do about resolving them, and you'll bring a builder's mindset to reliability: automating toil, sharpening our observability, and increasingly, putting AI to work so humans can focus on the problems that actually need them.

This is a role for someone who's equally comfortable in a 1:1 coaching a direct report and in the middle of a SEV-1 driving toward resolution.

What you will be doing: 

Your Team

• Coach, mentor, and grow a team of SREs — real career development, not just performance reviews on a calendar
• Hire and retain strong engineers; build a team people want to stay on
• Create a culture where blameless postmortems are the norm and people feel safe raising issues early
• Drive day-to-day project management for the team - running standups, grooming and tracking tickets, and keeping work visible to stakeholders

Reliability & Systems

• Own the availability and performance of production systems end-to-end
• Set the bar on SLIs/SLOs/SLAs and error budgets - and hold the team (and yourself) to them
• Run incident management: on-call, escalation, and the postmortems that actually change something afterward
• Push automation hard so the team spends less time on repetitive firefighting and more on durable fixes
• Own capacity planning, scaling, and disaster recovery strategy

AI-Augmented Operations

• Put AI investigation/incident agents to work proactively surfacing issues - degraded services, slow endpoints, anomalous error rates - before they page anyone
• Evaluate and tune AI/LLM-based tooling to cut down false positives and sharpen alerting
• Bring AI into the incident workflow itself: auto-summarizing incidents, suggesting root cause, drafting the first pass of a postmortem
• Know where automation should stop and human judgment should take over - and make that call
• Keep scouting for the next place AI can shave time off MTTR or catch something before a customer does

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Security to bake reliability into the SDLC from the start, not bolt it on after
• Be the calm, clear voice coordinating stakeholders during major incidents
• Represent SRE in architecture reviews and roadmap conversations - and push back when reliability is an afterthought
• Translate reliability metrics and risk into language leadership can act on

Process & Strategy

• Keep runbooks and playbooks current - not aspirational documents nobody opens during an incident
• Track the metrics that matter: uptime, MTTR, MTTD, error budgets
• Drive continuous improvement in monitoring, alerting, and incident tooling
• Weigh in on budget and vendor decisions for observability and infrastructure

What you should have:

• 8+ years in SRE, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering
• 2+ years leading or managing a team
• Deep familiarity with distributed systems and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), plus Kubernetes/Docker
• Real experience with observability tooling - Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Honeycomb, ClickHouse
• Comfort with CI/CD and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible, or similar)
• A track record of owning incident management and building a genuine postmortem culture
• Strong scripting/programming chops (Python, Go, or similar)
• The ability to explain a gnarly technical problem to someone who doesn't want the gnarly details

What we hope you have:

• Experience implementing telephony solutions in-house.
• Chaos engineering experience
• Managing on-call across distributed or global teams
• Exposure to security/compliance-adjacent reliability work (SOC2, ISO 27001)
• A history of scaling an SRE function as a company grows

How You Think:

• Strategic enough to see around corners, hands-on enough to jump in when it matters
• You own outcomes, especially the messy ones, during an incident
• You can triage ruthlessly when everything feels urgent
• You trust data over gut feel, but you know when to override both
• You lead like you're on the team, not above it

Why you'll love working here:

Podium is the best place to work to:

• Join the leaders in AI agents — you'll be building on top of a product already trusted by 60,000+ businesses to run their AI Employee, with a real mandate and real usage to learn from
• Unlock career-defining growth — this role owns a product area at the center of Podium's future, with the scope and visibility that comes with it
• Build with world-class talent — join a team of engineers who ship fast, use AI tooling seriously, and care as much about outcomes as elegance
• Make a real impact on local business — the agents you build directly help local businesses respond faster, convert more leads, and grow revenue without adding headcount

Benefits:

• Open and transparent culture 
• Life insurance, long and short-term disability coverage
• Paid maternity and paternity leave
• Fertility Benefits
• Generous vacation time, plus three 4-day summer holiday weekends
• Excellent medical, dental, and vision benefits
• 401k Plan with company matching
• Bi-annual swag drops with cool Podium gear and apparel 
• A stellar HQ (Utah) gym with local professional coaches and classes offered
• Onsite HQ (Utah) child care center, subsidized for employees

Podium is an equal opportunity employer. Podium provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, genetic information, marital status or veteran status.